Diabetic Son? Parents Get Insulin Pump Tattoos

When their five year old son Jakob was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, he had to start using an insulin pump. To show their support, his parents Philippe Aumond and Camille Boivin both got insulin pump tattoos.

She and Aumond decided to get tattoos of the pump, “because no parents want to have their child feel left out or alone.”

“We shopped around to find a good tattoo artist because we wanted this pump to be really representative of the real thing — we didn’t want just to have a patch of black ink on us,” Boivin said.

“We found this guy, and he is a great tattoo artist, so he did those pumps for us and they look great, and Jacob was really thrilled when he saw that.

“And since then, each time people talk to him about his pump, he always lifts up my shirt and says, ‘Look, my mom has one too.’”

It turns out that real-life scientists are trying to make the idea of a medical device tattoo into a working reality. A nanoparticle-based tattoo that can monitor glucose levels in the blood of diabetes patients is under development by researchers at MIT; click the link under the picture to find out more details.

June's body is a tracery of lambent lines, like some arcane capillary circuitry in the core of Mao/K'ung Fu-Tzu. Following the current craze, she has had a subdermal pattern of micro-channels implanted. The channels are filled with synthetic luciferase, the biochemical responsible for the glow of fireflies.
(Read more about Di Filippo's Subdermal Microchannels)